Courtesy of Netflix

I was lucky to attend the TIFF premiere of Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein earlier this week, with the filmmaker and cast in full attendance. For most fans of cinema, this would be a dream event. For me, it felt sacred. Del Toro has long been my favourite filmmaker—something I’ve occasionally felt shy admitting, not because of his artistry, but because of the optics of aligning myself with such a universally beloved director. Still, there’s no arguing that my loyatly lies in del Toro, the patron saint of outsider genre. And I’ve learned to say it proudly.

If anyone was going to find excuses to apologize for Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, I thought it was going to be me. So, imagine the shock I felt walking out feeling that his latest work of promised macabre majesty was instead bulky, saccharine, melodramatic, and ironically, lifeless.

Instead of embracing the intimacy, terror, and romance of Mary Shelley’s Gothic original, Frankenstein takes its cues more so from Tom Cruise’s disastrous 2017 The Mummy. That failed attempt at jumpstarting Universal’s “Dark Universe” leaned too heavily on bombast and spectacle. Sadly, del Toro’s approach here feels cut from somewhat similar cloth.

Oscar Isaac / Courtesy of Netflix

My favorite hallmarks of Gothic storytelling—untold horrors in tall shadows, the suffocating intimacy of obsession, the bleeding brutality of romance—are swapped for a lumbering action-adventure tone. The result is a film that feels bloated, as if Shelley’s slim, beating-heart novel has been stitched onto the oversized cadaver of a misguided Netflix blockbuster.

The project assembles a diamond ensemble of A-List talent. Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, and Mia Goth headline what should be a dream cast, but even their talents can’t save a tonally lost script. Isaac oscillates between tortured outsider and swaggering rock star. The mix never gels. Instead of a brilliant but tragic scientist, Victor reads as a man in the throes of a midlife crisis, stomping through scenes in embarrassing hats and shouting loudly into the void.

Isaac’s skill is undeniable, but the character’s motivations are still strangely incoherent. This is supposedly a man obsessed with the pursuit of science, yet he’s quick to abandon his unprecedentedly impressive creation after only weeks, choosing to set the creature aflame rather than grapple with the slow burn of scientific study and language barriers.

Mia Goth is caught in a thankless double duty as both Victor’s mother and, later, his love interest Elizabeth. It’s a strange and heavy-handed way of underscoring Victor’s bizarre mommy issues, further muddled by the bizarre recurring motif of Victor drinking milk as though it were mead. Goth does what she can, but the script reduces her to a figure of provocation. When Elizabeth abruptly falls for the Creature, apparently out of a fascination with insects (?), the effect is less Gothic tragedy than baffling contrivance.

Mia Goth / Courtesy of Netflix

And then there’s Jacob Elordi, whose performance as the Monster is both the film’s strongest and most misused. He approaches the role with nuance and sincerity, and in another film, he might have delivered a defining turn. Here, however, his sentimental, tear-streaked creature feels too at home with the already overwrought tone. Moments meant to elicit emotional pain too often tip into unintentional comedy, undermining his valiant efforts.

Del Toro’s best films (Pan’s Labyrinth, The Devil’s Backbone, The Shape of Water) draw their power from intimacy. They are Gothic fairy tales that thrive in silence, dread, and delicate emotion. Frankenstein, by contrast, seems desperate to impress with size and spectacle. In doing so, it loses the intimacy that makes Shelley’s story endure.

For someone like me—who proudly wears the label of “outsider” and finds kinship in del Toro’s devotion to the strange and the broken—this Frankenstein should have been an ecstatic experience. Instead, it left me stunned at how quickly it lost its pulse. There are flashes of brilliance, carried almost entirely by Elordi’s committed performance, but too often the film succumbs to bloat, melodrama, and tonal inconsistency.

Guillermo del Toro remains one of the most important filmmakers of our time, a true master of the dark and the magical. But even masters stumble. And this time, in trying to reanimate Mary Shelley’s monster, del Toro seems to have forgotten that the true horror of Frankenstein isn’t in the spectacle of creation, but in the quiet tragedy of its aftermath.

Frankenstein had its TIFF premiere on Monday, September 8th 2025.

Summary

Guillermo del Toro’s ‘Frankenstein’ feels closer to the bloated, action-heavy Dark Universe than to the sparkling, heartfelt Gothic fantasies we expect from him.

Tags: Frankenstein Guillermo del Toro TIFF 2025

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